Vice President JD Vance's new memoir Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith deserves to be read apart from readers' opinions of the vice president or his politics, according to a new review in The Free Press.
In his June 21 review, Princeton professor Robert P. George deliberately set politics aside, focusing instead on what the memoir has to say about what gives life lasting meaning and the choices that define a life well lived.
As Zeale previously reported, Communion, released last week, recounts Vance's journey from an evangelical Protestant upbringing through a period of atheism before he entered the Catholic Church in 2019. The memoir explores how that spiritual journey reshaped his understanding of family, vocation, and public service.
George framed his review around a question he said every person eventually faces.
“Anyone who wants to live a life that matters — and in some sense, I suppose, we all do — must first try to figure out what matters and why,” he said.
After Vance lost his Christian faith, he searched for meaning elsewhere, pursuing achievement, status, and professional success as measures of a good life, George wrote.
“[T]he acquisition of credentials became Vance’s new ‘religion,’” he observed.
Reflecting on that period of his life, Vance writes in his book, “one of the vices that animated me — looking back, probably since the earliest days of my life — was the arrogant desire to rise above others.”
Vance eventually came to see those ambitions as insufficient. Influenced by his wife, Usha, Catholic friends, and the writings of Catholic thinkers, he began reconsidering Christianity.
“And so, once again, he began to lose his faith — this time, in the religion of status,” George wrote.
George noted the guidance of Dominican Father Henry Stephan, who introduced Vance to the Catholic understanding of grace as a lifelong process nurtured through prayer, the sacraments, and daily conversion.
Recalling the lesson in the memoir, Vance wrote that he came to understand that “real grace comes through practice.”
George explained that this realization was instrumental to Vance's conversion, writing that Catholicism ultimately redirected his attention from worldly success to lasting values. In one passage George brought attention to, Vance wrote that “Catholic teachings touched the part of my heart and mind that demanded that I focus on the things that actually matter.”
George returned to what he sees as the memoir's central theme: distinguishing between the pursuits that seem important and those that ultimately give life meaning. While wealth, influence, status, and professional success all have value, he wrote, they are not ends in themselves.
“[C]ontrast these things with the things that are indeed worthwhile for their own sake: faith, family, friendship, knowledge, wisdom, beauty, honesty, decency, respect,” he said. “These things are intrinsically, and not merely instrumentally, valuable. They are constitutive aspects of our flourishing as human beings.”
That theme resurfaces in Vance's reflection on the death of Charlie Kirk, which George described as one of the memoir's most clarifying moments.
“I found myself wondering what my wife and kids would say about me if an assassin took my life,” Vance wrote. “Mostly good things, I thought. But none of them will care that I was the vice president.”
George said that moments like these reflect the way Vance believes Catholicism reordered his priorities. Looking back, Vance said that “the best part of me took its cues from Catholicism,” leading him to care more about “how I rated as a husband and father than as an income earner.”
However readers view Vance's politics, George suggested that Communion offers an opportunity to reflect on the difference between temporary achievements and the deeper qualities that define a meaningful life. Borrowing a distinction made by columnist David Brooks, George wrote that lasting happiness is found not in “résumé virtues” but in “eulogy virtues.”
“What I came away from the book confidently thinking is that J.D. Vance was a troubled kid who wanted to lead a meaningful life — a life that matters,” George wrote. “He came to see that leading a life that matters requires a person to identify the things that matter — that really matter — and to distinguish those things from the things that matter, but not, in the end, all that much.”